Quantifying the Roman Economy

Methods and Problems

Edited by A L A N BOWMAN

and ANDREW WILSON

0xIO';RD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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How Prosperous were the Romans? 329

The reason that these comparisons are possible is because many researchers are studying real wages around the world in a systematic way.& One of the grand questions in modern economic history is why Europe pulled ahead of the rest of the world, and that question cannot be answered until we know when the "reat divergence' happened.? Real wages are one indicator of that separation. By using standard methodologies developed to chart the great diver- gence, Roman historians can avail themselves of the emerging picture of post-mdiwal living standards and use it to judge Roman per- formance. At the same time, the Roman empire will be integrated into this broader world-view. This chapter is a first stab at that problem.

To measure the purchasing power of wages, we need information about wages and the prices of consumer goods. The data used in this chapter are all derived from Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices issued in AD 301.8 There are questions about how long the edict was enforced and how the maximum prices it specified relate to actual wages and prices in different parts of the empire;9 indeed, one way to improve on the results here is to rework the calculations with wages and prim specific to a variety of times and places. However, since the Price Edict is such a well-known source and includes most of the necessary information it is worth seeing what it has to say.

The approach I. use i s straightforward. First, I calculate from daily wages what a labourer would earn in a year if he worked full time. Second, I calculate the cost of supporting a family. ?'his involves specifying the items-and the quantities-they would have con- sumed in a year, This list is called their 'consumption basket'. Multiplying the quantities by their prices defines the cost of living, Third, I compare income to living costs. Could the labourer purchase the specified basket? Doing the same calculations for the Roman

6 van Zanden 1 9 9 ; Alien 2001; dzrnucur and R m u k 2002; Bassino and Ma 2005; Allen et nl, 2007.

? Pnmeranz 2000. "or the prices in the Mict F have used the edition of buffer (1971), The most

important modern publications are Reynolds 1971. Erim et al. 1970 and 1973, Giaccheto 1974. See also Errnatinger 1990. 'The fullest English translation of the text, as it was then known, is that of Grascr (1940).

9 Sec Ermatinger 1990.

How Prosperous were the Romans? 33 1

20

Fig. 16.1. Silver wages Sorrrre: Allm et nl. (2007) and tm.

exchange, currencies are usually converted according to their silver equivalents. How much silver was in a denarius at the time of the Price Edict? I take it to have been 0.032 grams of pure silver.ll In that case, the daily wage of a lahurer was 1.16 grams of silver.

H According to King (1993: 11), the nrgmtetts, which was the coin worth one hundred dennrii, had a theoretical weight of 3.38 grams of silver. In practice, however, the actual weight was a bit lower. It should be noted that the welfare ratios computed in this chapter are independent of the silver content asst~mcd for the dman'tis. The reason is thst the welfare ratios are ratios. The silver exchange raw appears in the numerator where it converts the wage from dcnarii to grams of silver and in the denominator where i t does the same for the pr im. Thus, the silver exchange rate cancels out.

How Prosperm were the Romans? 333

Table 16.1. Northern European respectability basket

Nutrientslday Quantity per Price g. silver Spmding Nutrientsiday grams of person per year pcr unit share (%) cslor~cs protein

Bread 182 kg 0.693 30.4 1,223 50 Beanslpess 52 1 0.477 6.0 160 l0 Meat 28 kg 2.2 13 13.9 178 14 Buttrr 5.2 kg 3.470 4.3 104 0 Cheese 5.2 kg 2.843 3.6 53 3 EMS 52 each 0.0 10 t .3 11 1 Rcer 182 1 0.470 20.6 212 2 Snap 2.6 kg 2.880 1.8 Linen 3m 4.369 5.3 Candles 2.6 kg 4.980 3.1 Lamp oil 2.61 7.545 4.7 Furl 5.0 M BTU 4.164 5.0 Total 414.899 100.0 1,941 80

budgets and suggests the spending pattern of 'respectable' workers. The budget is medieval, however, in that it does not indude foods like sugar and potatoes that only entered mass consumption after the European discovery of America.

The budget shown in Table 16.1 represents the spending of an adult male. It should be noted that wheat brad was consumed in some re@ons, while rye bread was consumed in others. In some places, veal was eaten, in others, it was beef or park. I have followed the maxim 'when in Rome, do as the Romans' and b e calculated the cost of the basket using the price of the most widely consumed type of bread or meat. The budget's daily calorie intake ( E ,940) would put the person in the third decile from the bottom of the English distribution in the bte eighteenth century and in the fourth decile of the French.l Protein availability was high. This was 'respectability' rather than destitution.

Frequently mentioned non-food commodities like cloth, candles, and fuel are also included. Textiles presented a problem. The only type of doth shown is linen, although much wool was also worn. The available price data for wool are hard to interpret, however. One needs the price of the same quality of woollen cloth in the pIam compared, but wool varied enormously in terms of quaIity, and

14 Fogel I991: 45.

Robert C. AlIen

quality differences seem to have driven the differences in the prices we have. Wool cloth is, therefore, not useful for the present exercise. Linen does not appear to suffer from the same problem. I have included enough linen in the budget, so that the share of linen in spending is what one would expect for all textiles.

Table 16.1 lists average prices in grams of silver for 1745-54 prevading in Strasbourg. When the cost of the basket is caiculated with these prices, it amounts to 414.899 grams of silver per year. Prices were different in other cities and in other times, but this gives an indication of the price level in eighteenth-century Europe.

Table 16.1 also omits the cost of housing. Budget studies suggest it amounted to 510% of spending. I have not been able to find the rent of comparable housing in the cities studied, so I have dealt with this problem by increasing the cost of everything except the housing by 5%.

While Table 16.1 describes spending in northern Europe, it does not apply to the Mediterranean. In southern Europe, wine was consumed instead of beer, and olive oil was used instead of butter. In reckoning the cost of living in Mediterranean cities, I substituted olive oil for butter and wine for beer. In the Iatter case, the quantity was reduced to maintain the same annual consumption of alcohol. Table 16.2 shows the resulting Mediterranean budget. Its cost in

TabIe 16.2. Mediterranean respectability basket

Quantity per Strasbourg price Naples price Diocletian price person per year g. silver per unit g. silver per unit- g. silver per unit

Bread Beanslpeas Meat Olive oil Cheese E a s Wine Soap Linen Candles Lamp oil Fuel

l82kg 521 26 '% 5.2 1 5.2 kg 52 each 68.25 1 2-6 kg 5 m 2.6kg 2.6 1 5.0 M m

Total 416.3583 355.9249 163.921

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Wine: 8 denarii per pint as for ordinary wine (11, 10). Cloth: cover to be used as a tent, 16 feet in length and breadth, dyed (XIX, 4). The cloth is 256 square Roman feet in area and priced at 2,500 denarii or 9.77 denarii per square Roman foot. A Roman foot was 296.2 mm, so the doth cost 1 1 1.3089 denarii or 5.877 grams of silver per square metre. The early modern prices are for pieces one metre long and typicaIly about one ell (27 inches or 0.6858 metres) wide. A piece this size would have cost 4.03 gxams of silver in AD 301.

Fuel: 'wagon load of wood, 1200 pounds' worth 150 denarii (XW, 8) or 0.125 denarii pm Roman pound (0.32745 kg) or 0.0 122 16 grams of silver per kilogram (0.032 x 0.12510.32745). 1 assume that one kilogram of wood yields 7,701 BTTJs,l5 The price of energy in grams of silver per million BTUs was, therefore, 1.586 = 1,000 X 0.01221617.701.

Bread: bread does not appear in theuia. It does give a maximum price for wheat 100 denarii per casmsis modius of 12.936 litres: I, 1) and the wage for a skilled worker, in particular a baker at 50 denatii per day plus maintenance (VIt, 12). I estimated the price of bread from these data using the 'bread equation' I estimated previousIy.1~ This is a statistical equation estimated from an early modern dataset of bread prices, grain prices, and wage rates. The equation fits the data well and provides a means of estimating the price of bread from the cost of its two main inputs. The equation used here is:

price of bread = 0.063 4 1,226 X price of wheat + 0.014 X daily wage of skifled labour

The prices and wages are all in grams of silver, the price of bread is grams of silver per kilogram, and the price of wheat is grams of silver per litre.

Table 16.2 shows the prices used in computing the cost of living in Diocletian's day. When the prices are ntultiplied by the quantities shown, the cost of the basket can be calculated. Et works out at 163.921 grams of silver per year, This was a much lower cost of living than in Naples or Srrasbourg.

15 Alien (2003b) tabulates themergy content of many fucls measurcd by weight and volumc. This paper is available on mv website at httal/www.nuff.o~acu~~~~iolow.

Fig. 16.2. Welfare ratios with European respectability basket So~rrce: Allen er al. (2007) and tm.

Workrs elsewhere in Europe and Asia experienced real wage slides across the early modem period, There was a wage peak in the fifteenth century following the population drop caused by the Black Death in 134819 and subsequent outbreaks. As population grew from the sixteenth century onward, real wages fell. By the eighteenth century, most workers in Eurasia had earnings that only equalled half of the cost of the basket. Workers in the Dutch Republic and EngIand were the only ones to avoid this fate as the economies of these countries grew rapidly due to their success in the global economy.

How Prosperous wme the Romans?

BARE BONES SUBSISTENCE BASKETS

What happened to workers in southern Europe, east Asia, and the Roman empire who were too poor to buy the baskets-meagre as they are-shown in Tables 16.1 and 2? One strategy was to increase the time workd. Men could work more days and longer hours. No allowance has been made thus far for the earnings of women and children. They could work many hours, although their wage rates were usually so low that their employment could not decisively change the situation. China was an exception to this generalization, for women there contributed a significant proportion of family income.18

Cutting expenditure was the other strategy. That was possible because the food shown was highly processed either by animals (meat) or by pmple (bread and beer). Indeed, the way to cut costs was sharply to curtail most of the non-food items, eliminalte the alcohol and most ofthe animal protein, and eat boiled grains rather than bread. Scottish highlanders ate oatmeal, Italians shifted from bread to palenta, and many Asians ate mostly rice. In the Yangzi Delta, poor peasants even ate boiled wheat in the sumrner.19

Early modern travellers' accounts often depict many people sub- sisting on diets like this. 'It appears from contemporary accounts that the articles in the diet of the common people in most parts of India consisted chiefly of rice, millets and puIses.'20 Francisco Palsaert, a Dutch East India Company captain who visited the subcontinent in the early seventeenth century, called the Indian diet 'monotonous: In the Delhi-Agra region, the people 'have nothing but a little kitchery [kedgeree] made of green pulse mixed with rice. . . eaten with butter in the evening, in the day time they munch a little parched pulse or other grain'. The workmen 'know little of the taste of meat'. Indeed, pigs, cattle, chickens, and eggs were all taboo. Where available, fish was the only source of animal protein. It was a similar story in western India. Wheat was not eaten by the labouring population,

Li 1998: 150-5; Pomerenz 2000: 290,3191.20. Li 1998: 207 n. 25, Raychaudhuri and Habib L982. I: 164.

whose main source of carbohydrates was millet. This was ground into a course flour and fried up as chapatis that were eaten with pulses and vegetables. Charles Lackyer, who toured Asia in the early eighreenth century on the English East India Company ship Streatham, observed of the Arab sailors in the Indian Ocean: 'They serve for small Wages, and are Victual'd at a much cheaper Rate than out Ship's Companys: Salt-fish, Rice, Gee, and Doll, with a few Fowls, being all the Provisions they care for. Doll is a small Grain, less than Fetches, contains a Substance like our white Peas, and being boil'd with Rice makes Kutcheree.'2'

I specified such quasi-vegetarian 'bare bones' spending patterns for each of the places being compared. Oa,tmeal was the basis of the diet in north-western Europe, poIenta in northern Italy, and millet in western India. Table 16.3 shows the bare bones basket for north- western Europe and for the Romans. The Roman diet was dominated by wheat and beans, which supply most of the calories and protein. The calorie level has been kept at 1940 calories per day, as before. While animal protein has been greatly reduced, the wheat and beans provide a diet that is comparably rich in protein,

The great thing about the bare bones diet is that it cost much less than the respectability diet-in the case of Rome, 83.163 grams of silver versus 163,92 1. Hence, the cost of supporting a family was cut to 261.963. This was something that the Roman labourer muld afford. Indeed, the ratio of income to the conswn~ption expenditure jumped to 1.10, so the laborrrer had a bit of income to spend on 'luxuries',

All workers see a rise in their welfare ratios, when bare bones spending patterns are the basis for comparison, as F'ig. 16.3 shows. The Figure shows the same relative values as Fig. 16.2, but the pout workers of the eighteenth century all had welfare ratios of one or a bit above. Labourers in London and Amsterdam earned three or four times the cost of the bare bones diet. They did not multiply their oatmeal consumption by four, however. Instead, they increased their purchases of non-food items and bought the more expensive foods of the respectability diet. The essence of the matter is captured by

I -m- London + Amsterdam U Vienna ;P I + Florence Delhi -A- Beijing /

T

Roman emplm AD 3 1 1 L Fig. 16.3. Welfare ratios with bare bones baskets Soum: Allcn cl #l. (2037) and tewr.

Doctor Johnson's definition of oats as 'a grain, which in EngIand is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'.

The real wage evidence supports a guardedly optimistic view ol Roman living standards. Certainly, the Roman worker in Diocletian's time was doing about as well as most workers in eighteenth-century Europe or Asia. One lesson that price history teaches, however, is that real wages fluctuated in the past. Indeed, Roman performance Iooks unimpressive in comparison with. fifteenth-century Europe, when real wages were so high. In addition, generalizations are confounded by

HOW Prosperous were the Romans? 343

variation across space with workers in booming parts of the contin- ent earning much more than their counterparts in more placid provinces. One suspects that the same was true of the Roman empire. The next step in the research agenda shouId, therefore, be to use actual wages and prices (rather than legal maxima) to measure real wages in the Roman period and 20 do this for different regions of the empire and different time periods. That investigation might reveal as much variation as we observe in the early modern world and lead to a more complex assessment of Roman living standards.

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